One doesn't have to leave Earth's atmosphere to feel as if one is on another planet. Feelings of estrangement can happen anywhere. The Trinidad-born Canadian author André Alexis (The Hidden Keys; Days by Moonlight) experiments with the multifaceted concepts of connection and belonging in Other Worlds, his assured collection of nine stories. Some of these works are indeed otherworldly, among them "Contrition: An Isekai," in which a Trinidadian sorcerer dies in 1857 and is reincarnated 100 years later as a seven-year-old boy in Ontario. Then there is "Winter, or A Town Near Palgrave," a skin-crawler that puts a writer looking for solitude in a town north of Toronto, where a patron tells him that his caretaking duties include rubbing balm on large sacks hanging inside of houses. The only advice? "Stop immediately if you hear groaning."
The more down-to-earth offerings in this brilliant collection also have the power to disconcert. They include "A Certain Likeness," where a 40-ish archivist begins a relationship with an artist in his 60s, a man who slept with her mother many years earlier and may or may not be the archivist's father; "A Misfortune," the tale of a middle-aged woman dealing with the guilt of having accidentally shot her father when she was six; and "The Bridle Path," a perceptive meditation on class and servility in its story of a tax attorney from a modest background who befriends a wealthy couple. No one in these stories is quite where they belong, and that's part of the fun of this constantly surprising assortment. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer